When Peter Diamandis took to the stage at Madrid's Palacio de Cibeles for the Audi Summit for Progress last Tuesday, WhatsApp had crashed and the Wi-Fi wasn't working properly. It was a blow to the audience's faith in technology, but Diamandis, the star speaker at the summit, was ready to counter this. The 61-year-old doctor and engineer from New York has blind faith in the power of innovation and science. Diamandis, who is the founder of Singularity University and a friend of tycoon Elon Musk, has set up a number of technology companies and written several books in which he predicts a future of abundance, longevity, flying cars and an exponential increase in resources. It's a vision that is hard to imagine in times of war, an energy crisis and growing fears of recession.

More and more is happening…. More connectivity occurs now in a calendar year than occurred in a million years a billion years ago. So somehow as we approach the present, we find ourselves in an ever denser realm of activity, interrelationship, connectivity, and the result of this is more of the same: producing a shrinking globe, ever more immersive technologies, dissolution of political, social, gender, class boundaries, of all sorts…. We're about to become unrecognizable to ourselves as a species. And then there's that new Netflix docudrama, The Social Dilemma, that, in the words of one review, "examines the various ways social media and social networking companies have manipulated human psychology to rewire the human brain and what it means for society in general."

Peter Diamandis is best known as the founder of the XPrize Foundation, which offers big cash prizes as an incentive for tech solutions to big problems. The entrepreneur and investor is also co-founder of the Singularity University, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit offering education in futurology. His new book, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, argues that the already rapid pace of technological innovation is about to get a whole lot quicker. Do you think people are worried about where technology is going to take us? I can palpably feel how fast things are changing and that the rate of change is accelerating, and I have picked up a growing amount of fear coming from people who don't understand where the world is going.

First, in this post, we'll take a look at the year's top articles from Singularity Hub, and next week we'll post some of our favorite writing from around the web. The year was a bit of a rollercoaster. We got the Impossible Whopper, an advanced robot dog called Spot, a "word processor" for gene editing, and the first image of a black hole. We also marked the dubious anniversary of the first genetically modified babies, scientists called for a global moratorium on germline engineering, and big tech continued to face a backlash from within and without. Machine learning algorithms beat top players in multiplayer video games, and a former world champion in the game of Go retired, saying AI cannot be defeated.

The greatest unfair competitive advantage for your small business is leveraging this critical shift in how you view the drivers of the future. As I was growing up I'd often quip that my grandmother, who had been born at the start of the 20th Century in a Greek village and lived to nearly the age of 100, saw more change in her lifetime than I'd ever possibly see. Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong because my future math was a few exponents short. A recent webcast (below) by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil (co-founders of Singularity University) drove that point home and provided insight into how the future will be even more radically disruptive than anything we've already experienced and more so that what we can today predict. I've followed Peter and Ray for many years now and their ability to capture our imagination and stretch our minds is extraordinary.

Imagine if a third of your family died of the plague as religious fanatics preached "The end is nigh!" and threatened that the few pleasures you could squeeze out of life would lead to your eternal damnation. As wars raged around you, surrounded by death, disease, and the lowest grimy depths of poverty, it would be understandable to think the world was in the midst of an apocalyptic collapse. There have been a lot of periods throughout history when people thought they were living during the end times, and for some, this was an understandable attitude. But what about the person who tweets that the world is going to hell while safely sipping a latte on a city avenue? In many ways, things have never been better, yet there is still so much pessimism about where the world is heading. There are those who dedicate their careers to making sure the population stays angry, stressed and scared–we call them the media. I admit to being a part of the problem at times out of my failure to balance alerting readers to real dangers and giving breath to needless anxiety.

In 2011, Rob Nail thought he was retired. Never mind that he was only 15 years out of undergrad. He had co-founded Velocity 11, a robotics company that pioneered automation technology solutions for life science laboratories, and in late 2007, he sold it to Agilent Technologies. He had joined the board of Alite Designs, had become an angel investor, and generally enjoyed himself. He elected to take one of the first executive programs at Singularity University (SU), the Silicon Valley think-tank that offers educational programs and that serves as a business incubator, founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil.

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020. I want you to imagine how, in four years' time, technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns are about to get hyper-personalized thanks to advances in a few exponential technologies. Imagine a candidate who now knows everything about you, who can reach you wherever you happen to be looking, and who can use info scraped from social media (and intuited by machine learning algorithms) to speak directly to you and your interests. Here's what future election campaign marketing might feel like… In 2016, 78% of Americans have a social media profile.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most important technology we're developing this decade. Broadly, AI is the ability of a computer to understand your question, to search its vast memory banks, and to give you the best, most accurate, answer. AI is the ability of a computer to process a vast amount of information for you, make decisions, and take (and/or advise you to take) appropriate action. You may know early versions of AI as Siri on your iPhone, or IBM's Watson supercomputer. Watson made headlines back in 2011 by winning Jeopardy, and now it's helping doctors treat cancer patients by processing massive amounts of clinical data and cross-referencing thousands of individual cases and medical outcomes.

Last week in San Francisco, Singularity University hosted its first-ever Global Summit. In three days, we heard over 100 science and technology experts give talks in more categories than one human mind can fully process. Whether you attended the conference and need help making sense of the information or missed it and want a taste of the action, I've collected Singularity Hub articles on some of the major themes to give you takeaways from the event. If you're curious for a look inside the conference, you can watch: Singularity University Global Summit is the culmination of the Exponential Conference Series and the definitive place to witness converging exponential technologies and understand how they'll impact the world. As technology permeates almost every aspect of life, industries and institutions need to adapt how they think and operate.